Loy Kratong

Two weeks ago we celebrated Loy Kratong, a Thai festival where people make wishes and set free little boats, called Kratongs, into the waterways. We first celebrated the holiday at school with our kids. They came to school that day dressed in traditional Thai outfits-- absolutely adorable. In class, we "made" kratongs with them. This pretty much involved them stuffing a handful of flowers onto the top of kratongs that the Thai teachers had constructed beforehand. All the kids took their kratongs and floated them in the kiddie pool out in the yard.

This is probably the first big Thai festival that I've been really eager to celebrate, so I made a point of finding a way to experience it as "authentically" as I possibly could. I'm fortunate enough to have made some wonderful Thai friends through playing frisbee, one of whom hosted a Loy Kratong party.

My friend has an apartment near to the central docks on the Chao Phraya river. We had to push through massive crowds in her neighborhood in order to find our way to her place. Once at her building we joined the other party-goers on the rooftop. Although you can't quite see the river from her roof, the view was pretty spectacular. Fireworks going off randomly, giant lanterns floating through the sky, people milling about on the streets.



My Thai friends taught me how to properly make a kratong. Walking through the streets of Bangkok that night I observed many kratong vendors and learned that there is really no one way of making them- I even saw some made of bread. It is really just critical that they float. After all, the "Loy" in Loy Kratong means float. We used discs of banana palm as our base. Onto that, we nailed folded banana leaves. You then stick a candle and three sticks of incense on top. Last you cover the kratong with the flowers of your choice. Marigolds seem to be the most popular, I put a handful on mine and also added some orchids. My kratong may not have been the most complex or beautifully executed one floated that night, but I was pretty satisfied.





After watching a firework show from the rooftop we hit the streets. We weaved through massive crowds and street vendor stalls to get down to the river. I had expected to see the river filled with bobbing candle-lit kratongs... no such luck. I hadn't counted on the Chao Phraya being so swift. Once a kratong dropped in, it was whisked away quickly. We were told we could pay a few baht to take a boat out to the middle of the river to dump our kratongs if we wanted. We opted to stay on land and dropped them awkwardly off the side of the pier. This wasn't easy, our kratongs were rather small and dropping it from a few feet up meant that there was a high probability that they wouldn't land on their bottoms in the water. A few of my friend's kratongs hit the water candle-first. Mine went in a little lopsided but managed to float downstream for quite a while before the candle went out. I hope there is no correlation between the chance of my wish coming true and the length of time it took for the candle to go out.